"It's never the offence; it's the cover-up. And if there's one thing that the last few years have taught us, it's that the suggestion of a 'rogue' worker having acted alone to do something which led to an intrusion is never correct. There has to be a failure of management oversight as well. That's why Google is in such hot water now over the revelations contained in the Federal Communications Commission report into what went wrong with its Street View Wi-Fi data collection program." What a total and utter surprise: company does bad stuff, tries to cover it up. Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who grasps that companies - they are not to be trusted. This really isn't rocket science, people.

No, the idea of law is to encode ethics, but it is not all-encompassing it cannot be as far as I know. On the other hand law also extends into other areas, such as regulation of trade... and I am not sure how that would extend under the ethical umbrella.

Don't get me wrong, I am no expert... but what IS the purpose of having law? It is to regulate behavior, to be able to punish things done by one entity that are "wrong" or detrimental to another entity.

I completely agree with you there, but I don't really see how that's an argument that invalidates kwan_e's post. In fact, by saying the law doesn't encode ALL ethics, you confirm his point that Google may do something legal but not necessarily ethical. (Not that I agree with him that Google was being unethical here - I commented on that in another post.)